#social republic

[troythecatfish]

[violottie]

"At least 12 killed, including a mother with a baby strapped to her back, in twin bomb blasts that hit two camps for displaced people in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday 2nd May." from African Stream, 04/May/2024:

caption continued under video

This brave brother allegedly took the baby away from his dead mother's corpse; effectively, saving the baby's life, according to local reports.

The United Nations condemned the attack that targeted the camps in Lac Vert and Mugunga, near the city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, the UN said in a statement.

The attacks, in which at least 20 people were injured, were a "flagrant violation of human rights and international humanitarian law and may constitute a war crime”, it said.

Many of the victims were sleeping in their tents when the area was attacked.

The United States has accused the military in neighbouring Rwanda and the M23 rebel group of being behind the attacks. Yet the U.S. remains a staunch ally of Rwanda despite its many violations of human rights in DRC and its support for M23.

[lilithism1848]

[purgetrooperfox]

tired: fox has never done anything wrong in his life he was under control of the chip he didn't mean to kill fives he would never do that

wired: fox was being deliberately, continuously manipulated by palpatine into doing anything he wanted under threat of severe bodily harm, no chip necessary

inspired: fox is a product of brainwashing and genuinely believes in the senate and the republic, which is in constant conflict with the rhetoric he hears from politicians and his general dislike of senators, but that conflict is ultimately irrelevant. he believes in the institution with his entire self. he was born to die for this system and would lose his shit if he started questioning it in any meaningful way. The Institution told him to kill fives so he killed fives, it told him to hunt down ahsoka so he did it, etc etc. conviction that this is all worth it because the republic Can Only Be Right (or else his entire existence and everything the guard puts up with are meaningless) is what gets his ass out of bed in the morning. he'll do terrible things to protect it, and by extension his sense of self, and he won't apologize for it because it's categorically Right in his brain. none of this changes the fact that he's routinely abused by this system, or the fact that he's enslaved by it, or that he has no real choice in anything, only how he personally reconciles it all

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[baraste-legacy]

IF YOU PLAY SWTOR BUT AREN'T A SUBSCRIBER:

LOG INTO EVERY SWTOR CHARACTER YOU DIDN'T PLAY THIS YEAR, BEFORE GAME UPDATE 7.6 IS RELEASED, OR RISK LOSING THEIR NAMES!

This was announced during the 7.6 Livestream. Per Swtorista, 7.6's release ought to happen around December 10 (Life Day).

REMEMBER: Log into each character. Simply logging into the game isn't enough.

The way Preferred status works, one can only activate 20 of the characters in a server. As I don't think one can deactivate them to access the rest, I fear the only way to protect more than 20 characters per server is subscribing for a single month at the very least 😒 to be able to log into them all.

(If anyone knows better than this, please post about it 😐)

[degeneratedworker]

"Victory will surely belong to the Palestinian people" People's Republic of China c. 1970s

[godisarepublican]

SIMPLE: Confiscate all the cellphones

You're not dealing with adults here, at least not adult brains. These are children. They have the minds of children. They require that consequences be immediate and associated with the wrong. There's no other way they can learn.

Confiscate and shred their phones. Anyone present at an illegal protest -- including "disturbing the peace," or violence or vandalism or trespassing -- has their phone seized and shredded on the spot.

No more narcissism! Nobody is going to see them in their great revolutionary moment. No "Likes." No brownie points for "Standing up to the man."

Nobody is going to see them. And, they lost their phone, their whole life because, Lord knows, not three of them have any friends outside of social media...

Oh, sure, they'll be court battles and the LeftTards will probably win, but in the meantime their phone was shredded. Even if they get the government to pay for a new one, good luck with them recovering their social media footprint anytime soon...

Oo! And just as soon as the courts strike down the phone seizures? Re-write the law or regulation to get around the court ruling and do it again at the next "Peaceful Protest." The LeftTards will go to court, again, and probably win again, but good luck recovering the social media footprint, again. Then amend the laws/regulation and start all over again...

Once people know that their whole lives i.e. phones are the price of social unrest, they'll stay home.

[troythecatfish]

About 48% of the world's cobalt reserves are in Congo, but 70% of the world's mined cobalt comes from there.

Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe - and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out.

[easternblocrelics]

Prague, Czechoslovakia Color negative 1970s

[lilithism1848]

[violottie]

tw: rape, sexual assault, violence on women & children

"SAVING THE WOMEN OF CONGO!

"Congolese women are paying a terrible price for the conflict in eastern DRC. Those who escape the violence are often forced to find shelter in makeshift tent camps, without proper facilities or security - where they face a high risk of sexual assault." from African Stream, 26/Mar/2024:

(caption cont under video)

Many have children in their care and seek work outside the camps, including in dangerous cobalt mines. This has also left them vulnerable to militants who abduct and rape.

Children are also subjected to sexual abuse, with stigma and unwanted pregnancies making the trauma even harder to bear.

According to a UNICEF report, the rise in sexual violence in Congo went up by 37% in the first three months of 2023, compared with the year before.

The systematic use of rape as a weapon of war has been labeled a “medical and humanitarian emergency,” as aid groups struggle to provide adequate health and psychological services to affected women and children.

[baraste-legacy]

SWTOR's Eric Musco updating us on the player characters’ looks issues (new revision incoming):

My guess regarding the PC/NPC looks renovations is: what they can work with, in a non-disruptive manner, are the game textures (replacing existing ones, possibly by regenerating their library in an automated manner) and the "shaders" (the code that uses the textures and other data to render the imagery, by adding new tricks to it).

Adding stuff that implies new sliders and/or new types of textures (the animated facial expression wrinkles would be an example) is major work that they have to carefully consider (lots of ramifications).

[degeneratedworker]

"Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea: The great achievements of the People's Republic of China in the past three years." People's Republic of China c. 1950s

[minetteskvareninova]

It’s absolutely wild to me that American right-wingers can take a look at the totalitarian communist regimes in eastern Europe and conclude that the bad part was state providing basic services (healthcare, education etc.) and not, y’know. The totalitarianism.

[probablyasocialecologist]

If Ugandans have a social safety net, it is woven from banana fibers, and if there is a clear path to socialism, it will be lined with banana leaves. The lusuku model, premised on intercropping and smallholder farming, could be the basis for national agrarian reform that improves the lives of Uganda’s agricultural workers without accelerating the destruction of the natural environment. Uganda faces increasing difficulty feeding itself because of climate extremes and land degradation, and this affects farmers more significantly than anyone else. Moreover, since the 1990s, the ruling National Resistance Movement regime sold off and dismantled most of the coffee, tea, and cotton growers cooperatives, leaving smallholder farmers in the hands of the predatory middlemen which cooperatives had been established to protect them against. Unable to collectively bargain and exposed to dramatic fluctuations in the market prices for cash crops, many people left rural areas to search for employment in cities. This has been a driving force behind the massive inequality between rural and urban workers. Ugandans now produce more food than they consume, even exporting to other countries in the region, yet 41% of people are undernourished, and agricultural production has decreased over the last 20 years. For the most part, the strategy pursued by Uganda’s government has been to encourage the development of ecologically disastrous intensive agriculture for export, privileging foreign investors rather than developing the infrastructure that would benefit peasants. Indeed, while more than 70% of Ugandans are employed in agriculture, the sector only receives around 4% of public investment, and projects aimed at helping smallholder farmers have had very little success, even by their own standards. Many of the government’s investments in agriculture very clearly advantage larger landowners, to the detriment of the poorest farmers. For example, most of the government’s investment in labor-saving technologies has been spent on tractors, which are great for large plots but largely unaffordable or unsuitable for the average farmer, whose plot is usually between 1-3 acres large. However, a socialist transition premised on agroecological reforms could make use of the existing lusuku model to create the kind of growth that actually improves poor farmers’ lives without destroying their environment. This could begin with reestablishing cooperatives and engineering agricultural prices around social needs and goals, like guaranteeing access to food. Research from around the world has shown that while large, monocrop plantations are good at producing huge volumes of one crop, smallholder farms are more productive when evaluated on a per-unit area and are capable of securing national food sovereignty. Why, for example, should Ugandans buy rice imported from Pakistan or Vietnam when banana intercropping yields more calories per hectare than rice? Lusukus could feed the nation without relying on foreign experts, development aid, or the capital-intensive inputs now being imported to grow for export. Because lusukus are far better for the soil, they also improve the nation’s capacity to resist severe floods and drought, effects of climate change that hit poor farmers hardest. In these ways, the lusuku model could provide a sustainable path to socialist development.

[troythecatfish]