I always wanted to see far north and remote places like Svalbard and Greenland. Does the environment make people feel depressed or generally lethargic? Are Greenlanders more social or individualist and distanced? I imagine a strong community culture is in place to combat the feeling of isolation a lack of greenery and light might induce?

And how would you compare people from Greenland and Denmark?

I think the idea behind the graph was to make it look like blood flowing, but the execution was… not the best

Donated on Liberapay.

As others have said, this is financing software development, not a political campaign. I first learned of the fediverse when Reddit removed 3rd party apps, and I felt like my eyes were opened. This is what I want the internet to be, decentralized and running on open source software, and I’m sure I’m far from being alone in this, so thanks to the devs for that.

Also Jerboa is great!

I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.

I know that there is a number that’s visible on kbin called “reputation”, I think it works like karma, but I’m not sure. Yours is 2286: https://kbin.earth/u/@[email protected]/reputation/threads

This is actually a tactic Antoine-Augustin Parmentier used to popularize potatoes in France. He couldn’t get people to accept potatoes, so he placed armed guards to protect the plants, and withdrew them at a certain point in the day so that people could steal them.

lol, actually, good science would be on the left side of the image, at least after giving an answer to a question. Good science will actually prove something, then give the answer, then have no reason to continue to find another answer for it (whatever the issue is.) If you are giving a different answer year after year (like say for the age of the earth), then aren’t you admitting that so far you haven’t known the answer?

That’s not really the take of the modern philosophy of science. All modern schools of thought when it comes to science have the acceptance of falsehoods embedded into their nodels. I’ll give a few examples:

Karl Popper famously stated that science cannot prove that anything is true, only that something is false. Thus, any scientific theory that’s still accepted is regarded as not yet being proven wrong. Science is just a cycle of giving theories, proving them wrong, giving new ones to account for the problem of the old one and so on, ever getting closer to the truth, but never arriving.

Thomas Kuhn wrote about scientific paradigms, which are models of the field in question that every scientist uses (for example Aristotelian motion, which was surpassed by Newtonian mechanics, which were surpassed by Einstein’s relativity). During the period of “normal science”, scientists are using their established methods until they end up with too many problems they cannot resolve, at which point it is accepted that the paradigm cannot hold up, and a scientific revolution needs to bring forth a new paradigm, that is incomparable with the old one. Some knowledge is lost in this process, but we move on until the next crisis.

Paul Feyerabend wrote about countet-induction, which prevents science becoming a dogma. An example he gives is Copernicus going completely against the science of his time with his heliocentric system. The Ptolemaic system was as cutting edge science back then as quantum mechanics is today.

All in all, findings being continuously disproven and replaced by new ones is not bad science, it is science. Achieving actual, “true”, positive knowledge of the world, documenting it and saying “that’s it, we solved this problem, we’re done” is not something modern science event attempts at.

A small correction: there is no leader. The students themselves decide everything on plenary sessions and every decision is executed by working groups that are formed afterwards. You always have different people executing the decisions to avoid any one person being seen as a “leader”. And we are slowly shifting to citizens themselves forming local groups in their neighbourhoods with the same organisation.

But yes, the students asked that only Serbian flags be shown, because these are protests that have support from a wide range of people, from anarchist vegans to ultra nationalists, so they want to prevent any division. That doesn’t stop some right wing dipshits to bring Russian flags, even though Russia explicitly condemned the prorests as a “coloured revolution”, but what can you do.

While some EU representatives from the parliament have been supportive, the EU has a negative image because officials still act like everything’s in order. Ursula is set to meet with our psychopathic dictator, and Marta Kos wrote how she had a constructive talk concerning Serbia’s steps towards EU integration with the guy who tried to cause a bloodbath during the 15 mins of silence a few days ago. A guy who also officially (as a president under the Serbian constitution) has about as much say as I do concerning these things.

The part about the sonic cannon cannot be stressed enough. People were literally standing still in silence and our psychopathic overlord hit the crowded streets with a sonic cannon which could’ve very very easily created a stampede that would have led to thousdands of injuries and possibly even deaths. Honestly we were lucky that enough people managed to calm down and stop running after a few seconds.

Honestly, we avoided a massive tragedy at that moment. People described that it sounded like a car or airplane was coming at them at full speed, so they instinctively ran away from the roads. People further away didn’t see or hear anything, they just saw a crowd running in panic and so they ran as well. I was maybe 50-100m away from where it happened, and all we heard was noise, yells, and then people running, so the people around me also started running, but we all stopped after maybe 5s.

A lot of people think that our overlord wanted to cause a stampede which would lead to thousands of injuries and just chaos in order to discredit the protests. Or maybe they wanted to launch the cannon after the 15 mins of silence were over, which would cause mass confusion since nobody would have any idea what was going on, but triggered it early. In any case, the psychopath used an illegal weapon to attack people literally standing still and being quiet.

I’m convinced that at least 400k people were present, probably more. I’ve never seen such a crowd in my life, and I’ve been on most protests since 2020.

EDIT: The organisation that usually counts this stuff said around 300k, and maybe more, they couldn’t make a precise count because people were constatntly moving from place to place. Still the biggest one is Serbian history.

Exactly. Peterson taught psychology at a university (and even the quality of his lectures have been brought into question, but we’ll ignore that), and that somehow makes him an authority to talk about global warming and how all climate scientists are wrong because you can’t model something like that, it makes him an authority to talk about the nazis and how Hitler was actually guided by the people as he spoke only what they reacted positively to, he’s also an authority on economics when he says how the famine in the Soviet Union was caused by the communists killing all the smart and disciplined farmers, etc etc.

How can anyone seriously listen to a guy who said that women who complain about sexual harassment while wearing makeup are hypocrites is beyond me.

This is nice read on the topic: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

I’d add Adrienne Cowan from Seven Spires and Melissa Bonny from Ad Infinitum to that list. But, as you said, in symphonic metal you’d be hard pressed to find a band without an amazing female vocalist.

It’s hard to really give a true representation of the general atmoaphere in Serbia during these times. For as long as I’ve been conscious, Serbia was a land of cynics and depression. Negativity was the norm, and even I said back in November that these protests would last until new year / Christmas, then the students will go back home to get drunk or whatever and that will be the end of it. If someone had told me 3 months ago that almost the entire country would be optimistic about the future, that there would be a real chance to finally end the rule of SNS, that students would walk over 100km to places and be greeted as liberators by huge masses, fireworks and food, I’d ask them what movie were they watching. Also protests are being held all over the country, so much so that someone made a website to keep track of the future ones: kudanaprotest.rs

The next big gathering will be in Niš on the 1st of March.

I’m so used to seeing English everywhere that I actually have trouble navigating things like settings in my native Serbian.

Imagine if he went to Korea

That’s a tough question, I gave a more detailed answere here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/13457345

The opposition parties are not very popular, but the general idea is that we need to primarily get our institutions to actually function so that another Vucic doesn’t happen again, no matter who forms the government. Nobody really knows how this will play out exactly, since the students are vocal about the fact that they’re unaffiliated with any opposition or NGO, which is one of the reasons why they are so popular with the people. All major opposition parties rejected the idea of participating in any snap elections this year, and the students are asking for an expert transitional government to enable free elections. This is something most people support.

Yeah, someone made a joke about how our president is a master of diplomacy: he managed to build a bridge between Serbs and Croats (as we all despise him), and also make the US, Russia and China agree on something (all 3 have dismissed the student-led protests).

Not directly related to the anti-corruption protests, but Croats started boycotting their local supermarkets due to high prices, and the whole region soon followed suit. It’s honestly almost bizarre that while most of the world is looking bleak, the Balkans are now engaging in optimism and mutal support. This is the first time since I developed self-consciousness that I can say that Serbs are optimistic about the future, as many believe that this might very well be the end for the current regime, and that a new system with an emphasis on direct democracy will take its place.

I have to ask, as someone who has only a basic understanding of the philosophies, how are the end goals of Anarchists and Marxists different? I understood them as only having different methods of arriving to the same state of society without class, states and money - communism.

By my understanding, Anarchists go bottom up by propping up a parallel system based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, to the point where the state is no longer needed for anything, and Marxists (or rather Marxist-Leninists) go top down by seizing control of the state in the name of the workers, and then gradually give the workers more and more direct control until the state is no longer needed (“The withering of the state”).

Assuming what I just wrote is wrong, what faults would Anarchists and Marxists find in each other’s end goals, assuming they succeed in establishing their ideal societies?

The PM’s resignation is thought to have happened in order to force new elections and thus kill the momentum. The fact that they can win any election was used almost every time we had unrests (we had elections in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024 and now they want 2025).

All relevant opposition parties agreed (they very rarely agree on anything) that there will be no elections. Everyone is in agreement with that: prison time, a transitional government to enable free elections, and then we get elections. Who will form the transitional government? I’m not sure, but the atmosphere is generally that this has to be the end of SNS and all prominent members, nothing less is acceptable.

As for villages/cities: rural areas get most of their information from TV, and the few non-propaganda channels that exist are not even an option in remote areas, so a lot of them don’t even know anything from media besides “some students are protesting”. But these protests were held in places we would never expect (someone joked that places are rising up that didn’t rise up even against the Ottomans), so I’m not sure how are these events seen in remote villages.

Funny that you mentioned Bangladesh, because I remember reading about it being the “first gen z revolution” and thought how this could be the second. Students from Belgrade announced that they will walk to Novi Sad tomorrow to join the huge protests announced on Saturday, where again a bridge will be blocked for 24h (and another 2 for 3h each)