davel

• RT: ‘It was about sticking it to the Russians’ – Scott Ritter on US seizure of his passport
• Malaysia Sun: US seizes Scott Ritter's passport
• Al Bawaba: US confiscates former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter passport
• Daily Beast: Moscow Throws Putin Fanboy Scott Ritter Under the Bus

On how Lenin’s theory of imperialism was a conjunctural one to the period rather than a general/universal one, and how to conjuncturaly theorize on later periods, up to the present.

tl;dr: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is on the Board. Someone please update this meme:

Anyone know anything about “human rights advocate” Esra’a Al Shafei? This is all I found of note so far: S.T.O.P. and the Fight Against Surveillance

The amazing activists sneaking footage out of Uyghur detention facilities in China and those fighting for reproductive justice in the U.S. use the exact same encryption as criminals.

Where’s the footage, Esra'a? We’re still waiting on it…

From JWZ’s hot-take: I see no way this could possibly go wrong

Oh, and apparently one of the other board members, Ghavi, is a lawyer at a firm that is all-in on cryptocurrency and "AI" companies.

Anyway, on to the Board:

Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in Southwest Asia and North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, the first dedicated fund for feminist tech in the Global Majority. Esra’a currently serves on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy and freedom online.

Karien Bezuidenhout is an advocate for openness and supporter of social entrepreneurs. As the former director of the Shuttleworth Foundation, her core interest lies in social and policy innovation through practical interventions and sustainable social enterprises. Through her experience as a board member to social change organisations and social enterprises across the world, she strives to make connections that accelerate learning.

Amir Ghavi leads Fried Frank’s core technology practices as the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice, where he advises clients on cutting edge technology and intellectual property matters. Amir is also a regular speaker, panelist and commentator to the media on digital assets and quantum computing.

Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of Mastodon since 2020. Felix helped Eugen by incorporating the project in a non-profit LLC in Germany and raising additional funds from Prototype Fund, NLnet and GLS Bank. Felix is the CEO of SOLARYS, a company developing software for volunteer firefighters in the DACH region.

Biz Stone is an entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media platforms. Biz’s career spans various facets of technology and social networking, including contributions to the development of blogging, podcasting, and social media. Beyond Twitter, Biz has engaged in various philanthropic efforts and tech ventures, emphasizing the importance of corporate responsibility and the potential of technology to address societal challenges.

I’m probably going to the_dunk_tank for this, but…

Requirements: Violentmonkey browser extension. Tampermonkey and Greasemonkey might work as well, but I haven’t & won’t test them. Note also that I haven’t & won’t test Chrome or Edge, either.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        lemmy-delete-tagline
// @match       https://hexbear.net/
// @require https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@violentmonkey/dom@2
// ==/UserScript==
VM.observe(document.body, () => {
  const node = document.querySelector('#tagline');
  if (node) {
    node.remove();
    return true;
  }
});

Edit to add: Maybe it needs some work: when I click on the homepage icon from another page, it fails to remove the tagline. I’m an old who doesn’t understand how progressive web applications work. Maybe I need to remove the return true and also tune how often the observer observes. Or maybe there’s some trigger I should hook it up to. Simply removing return true does seem to work, but I have no idea if it’s at the cost of any appreciable performance.

Edit to add more: !companero@hexbear.net suggested that I just use a uBlock Origin filter. I tried it and it works. It’s as simple as:

hexbear.net###tagline

An excellent Critical Theory Workshop lecture and Q&A on fascisms and liberalisms—contemporary but also historical—through a dialiectical materialist lens.

Beldon for scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up-dfbIeBIc

Effort posts are messages in bottles.

My response to this weapons-grade gish gallop:

Tiananmen square massacre

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• 1989 Tian'anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• ‘Tank Man’: the full footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989

their genocide of the Uighur people

This bullshit never ends, does it?

• https://lemmy.ml/comment/8588979
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China

their oppression of Hong Kong

Hong Kong was the product of the UK’s century of Chinese oppression, and their 99 year lease on oppressing Hong Kong ended in 1997.

steal Taiwan’s sovereignty

Taiwan is only considered sovereign by eleven countries, most of which are micronations like the Holy See, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan

was a bigger crime

• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• Are We The Baddies?

How to effectively counter imperialist lies on Xinjiang on the internet: A Guide

Any tactical changes or improvements to be made?

Maybe the last 500 years of Atlanticist colonialism has something to do with it.
And also maybe the CIA: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

In this regard, the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer played a foundational role in the establishment of what is known as Western Marxism, and more specifically Cultural Marxism. Figures like Horkheimer and his lifelong collaborator Theodor Adorno not only rejected actually existing socialism, but they directly identified it with fascism by benightedly relying—very much like French theory—on the ideological category of totalitarianism. Embracing a highly intellectualized and melodramatic version of what would later become known as TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), they focused on the realm of bourgeois art and culture as perhaps the only potential site of salvation. This is because thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, with a few exceptions, were largely idealist in their theoretical practice: if meaningful social change was foreclosed in the practical world, deliverance was to be sought in the geistig—meaning intellectual and spiritual—realm of novel thought-forms and innovative bourgeois culture.

[…]

Finally, the evolution of the Frankfurt School into its second (Jürgen Habermas) and third generations (Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and so on) did not alter in the least its anticommunist orientation. On the contrary, Habermas explicitly claimed that state socialism was bankrupt and argued for creating space within the capitalist system and its purportedly democratic institutions for the ideal of an inclusive “procedure of discursive will-formation.” The neo-Habermasians of the third generation have continued this orientation.