This is my favourite places. I used to live in Treptower for a few months and would go there pretty frequently.

It’s a war cemetery, marking the final resting place of more than 7000 Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin. More than 80 000 Soviet soldiers fell in the battle in total.

The monument is much bigger than this statue. in the middle of the park of the monument there are these gigantic stone flags, hanging to each side. Directly across from the soldier is a large, but significantly smaller, statue of a woman kneeling in respect for the soldier. Then there’s all these huge square stones depicting scenes from the war, with quotes by Stalin written in gold in Russian and German on the side.

What I love about it, in addition to the symmetry and the somewhat over the top nature of it all, is that it’s positioned exactly where two traumatic pasts meet. It is in part a sacred space; in part a painful memory. Some will criticize it for glorifying Stalin and the GDR; others have labelled it the “Tomb of the Unknown Rapist”, in reference to the not always excellent conduct of the Red Army. But despite everything­—and there is a lot—one can’t help but feel an immense gratitude to the 7 000 lying there. It’s a place where history and ideas collide, and one is struck by the complexity maybe more than the beauty.

Shoot, you’re right. I’ve seen so many stupid takes in this conflict it has made me dumb.

I’m sorry, but “limited ground operation” is the same type of shadowy bullshit language as calling the genocide in Gaza a “strategic operation”.

I don’t think anyone is making the point that it’s literally the exact same thing.

But what we’re witnessing is that Israel can bomb a civilian population to rubble for months and months, and all the intensional community can stutter out is that they “have a right to defend themselves”.

Now they are bombing a foreign capital and sending in ground troops to their neighbouring country to fight off a militia that they themselves are responsible for creating by invading in the past, and we know exactly what the chorus will be. Right to defend themselves.

We will see our Lebanese friends and their families murdered, all for Israel’s right to defend themselves.

In Germany, the line was that they would stop at Poland. People make up different excuses for different atrocities.

I think a lot of people are rightfully fucking tired of excuses, and that’s the point. Not that it’s literally the same thing.

I agree completely that Hizbollah makes up a huge problem, and after their involvement in Syria there’s not a hint of legitimacy left in the organization if there ever was any.

But one would do well that to remember their origins: They are what’s left of the resistance from the last time Israel invaded Lebanon. So that’s what a great fucking success that was.

And Hizbollah are not Lebanon. They control territory, and they need to be fought, but this in not how one fights terrorist organizations. This is how you create terrorist organizations. Which is exactly what Israel did the last time they invaded.

Don’t forget, Germany had the right to defend itself.

That policeman said Mr. Cool If you’re not drunk then you’re a fool I said if that’s against the law Tell me why I never saw A man locked in that jail of yours Who wasn’t just as lowdown poor as me

Later on in live version’s he’d change the last line to “who wasn’t either black or as poor as me”.

I’m sure the Irish call it football when they speak English, but what about in Irish? If Google translate to Irish is trustable,

English to Irish Football = Peil

But also Soccer = Sacar

So maybe there’s two accepted variants. But where does Pail come from anyway? Let’s translate it back to English:

Peil = Very big potato

So most of the world plays football, some strange corners of it play soccer, and the Irish play very big potato.

I’d love if a native speaker could confirm this. #Irish #Gaeilge #football @[email protected] @[email protected]

I had a feeling that would be an issue!

On the one hand, football@soccer would be a good compromise.

On the other, we’re right, the Americans are wrong. Simple as that. So I sympathise with the lack of willingness to compromise on the matter.

I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.

And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it’ll take way too many communities with it.

If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.

I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would [email protected] be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?

And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like [email protected] is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like [email protected] - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.

This could mean many things.

One interpretation is to re-invent the world wide web. One recent effort to do so is Gemini, which is pretty charming with it’s completely text-based tiny internet that feels like the intimate web WWW must have been like in the early 90s or something.

If I had too much time on my hands I would love to tinker with it.

Is this why I am out of the loop? Is this a thing of American culture, or is it internet culture? Or both?

In any case, I watched the video, found it funny. Harmless absurdity is fun.

I mean… yeah, I do believe their bombing of Gaza is also extremely targeted.

It’s just a question of who you target.

Well, considering the ongoing genocide has been a “dangerous situation with a high risk of escalation” for almost a year now, it’s not very surprising their state-sponsored terrorist attack is merely a James Bond-esque intelligence strategy.

There’s quite a few people who think the social web is a good term for what this is; websites talking to each other, allowing for two-way communication across platforms.

Not everybody loves the word “Fediverse”. And then for those who like it, the connotations might be somewhat different.

You can’t really do anything right in this field, as there are thousands of people ready to cry their hearts out at any given decision. But calling communication between web platforms the social web is not extremely controversial, and it’s a bit easier to sell to a wider audience (government agencies, media outlets, people who don’t know what HTML is) than going on an on about some obscure Fediverse. Different uses.

Oh no! Somebody organized to further the interests of the free and open internet, and they didn’t invite me even though I was active on some IRC channel in 1995!

Cry me a fucking river.

Some background, explaining why this brutalist sculpture was made quite recently, and why it matters:

Resistance in Norway during the war:

During the war in Norway, the organized resistance against the Nazis generally took one of three forms.

One was organized in Britain. Norwegians would generally flee to Sweden, make their way from Sweden to the UK, receive training in the UK, and come back to Norway to do military missions. The heavy water sabotage is the most famous achievement of Norwegians together with British intelligence, but they did a lot of operations. Milorg was a central group here. Keep in mind that organized in Britain does not necessarily mean British, as our legitimate government was in exile in Britain at the time. Milorg had ties both to the Norwegian government and to the British army.

The other was the Norwegian merchant sailors: More than 30 000 Norwegian sailors (some sources say around 100 000) contributed to the Allied effort transporting military supplies along with civilian goods, making them the target of frequent attacks by the Germans. When coastal cities in the US were asked to keep the lights off so that the silhouettes of ships would not be visible, that was largely for Norwegian merchant ships. Both Churchill and Roosevelt highlighted the importance of the merchant sailors after the war, and already in 1942 the British admiral Gerald Charles Dickens gave the following quote:

Had it not been for the Norwegian merchant fleet, we might as well have asked Hitler for his terms.

Point being, there were many of them, they were incredibly important for the war effort, and they were operating as civilians. Many of them had communist ties.

The third strand was the Communist resistance. Important actors in this group was our veterans from the Spanish civil war: People who had gone to Spain to fight fascism there, came back to Norway with combat experience, and continued the battle at home. The most famous group in this regard is the Osvald group, to whom this sculpture is dedicated. There were more than 200 members of the Osvald group, and of course not all had combat experience from Spain: It also featured more regular people, for example police officers working actively against the Nazi regime from the inside. The Osvald group was aligned with the Soviet union, and wanted Norway to become communist after the war.

After the war:

Once the dust settled, the Labour party took hold in Norway, and we were under socialist rule for decades. However, we were aligned with the US, not with the Soviets. While our relationship to the Soviet Union was at times relatively good, we were generally suspicious of Communists, and illegal surveillance of Communists happened during the Labour rule.

For our war veterans, this meant a whole lot. We were praising Milorg almost constantly. The Osvald group, on the other side, was more or less forgotten: As they had fought for Communism, not for the Norwegian king and government, their contribution didn’t fit our narrative so well. So we largely ignored it. It wasn’t before 2013 that the Norwegian minister of defence had the guts to officially honour eight members of the Osvald group, of the 17 that were still alive.

Things were not much better for the merchant sailors. Their contribution was largely ignored for two reasons. The first, at least by my understanding, is that there were some Communist ties that the government was not too enthusiastic about. The second, possibly more important reason, is that there were too many of them. If we were to recognize their war effort this would mean recognizing them as soldiers rather than as civilians, which would be a slippery slope pay them soldiers’ pensions. Keep in mind that we didn’t find oil before the 70s; we were not a rich country in the postwar era.

So what about this sculpture, anyway

This statue was erected in 2015, specifically in honour of the Osvald group. Four surviving members of the Osvald group made it to the unveiling.

It’s fair to say art critics didn’t dig it. But that was never the point. The point was that we were finally willing to recognize the contribution of the communist resistance, and to do it explicitly: In a brutalst fashion, similar to design philosophies in the Soviet union at the time they were fighting as allies of the USSR, and with no uncertain form language. The hammer of communism is beating the shit out of that swastika.

There are two plaques. One lists the fallen from the Osvald group; the other the fallen workers of the national railways. The statue is placed outside of Oslo East Station, where the group conducted it’s first act of resistance in 1942.

I am still waiting for the merchant sailors (krigsseilerne) to be properly honoured.

Three ⁂ cat anuses you mean?

wow super problematic

Amazing - I read skimmed through the Wikipedia site for Swatting and tried to search online for it happening other places, but I couldn’t watch a video while commenting so I didnt watch the source.

Fantastic case in point.

Still I struggle to understand how it’s possible.

How the fuck can Swatting be such a common thing in America. I have never heard about it in any other country.

(This is, of course, a rhetorical question. I know the answer is that American police is beyond incompetent.)

Edit: Oops, read comments below