It will take years for Lemmy to take off in much the same way as Reddit had slowly built up.

As I and other mentioned before, the main downside of Lemmy is that the community you care about isn’t here (and frankly, I don’t know if they will even come here at all). Like, we don’t have AskHistorians here, and the Lemmy for your hometown or country is either quiet or just completely died. So, I end up having no choice but to return to Reddit to keep in touch with those communities. However, as someone who is privacy conscious since Reddit now sells your data to train AI, I try to log in to Reddit with Tor. But even with the Onion site of Reddit, it won’t let me log in at most times because of technical discrepancy with stupid captchas or something. Sometimes I could log in via Tor but most times I’m not able to.

Anyhow, I would love Lemmy to take off as soon as possible but there is teething problem common in new communities. But the pessimistic side of me thinks it may not since so many people have become too invested in Reddit. And the latter intentionally hooked people in for the worst reasons.

Being of East Asian descent, I am perpetually young.

To be fair, the egregious provisions of the PATRIOT act which allows unilateral spying by the US government has not been renewed. But on the one hand, there have been cases of law enforcement agencies buying information from data brokers, which companies have sold to. The Chinese government different, they can straight up spy on you and question you at any time.

This thing isn’t something that would personally affect me because here in Europe we have GDPR and the EU is consumer-friendly, but privacy is still I would be concerned of for other parts of the world.

Everything you said is literally the other way around.

Apartheid ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela, which is 4-5 years after the fall of communism.

I wonder though, maybe South Africa was easily made a pariah state in the 90s because it was the end of the Cold War. SA’s utility in geopolitics to contain communism had run its course. Meanwhile, Israel is situated in still tense Middle East, and the main reason US still support Israel is because the latter provides excellent intelligence gathering which they provide then to the US and the West.

As much as I dislike Obama’s drone strikes, at least he could stand up to Netanyahu.

I didn’t think Australia would still be religious enough to have considered this. They’re generally more liberal than the US.

That has not ever happened (to my knowledge).

One is a totalitarian state who could unleash all its might on you if they wish; the other is still subject to rules and regulations despite being corrupt. I’d rather have Ford and GM spying on my information for corporate interest than a state who wants to micromanage every aspect of your life, thank you very much.

Am I missing something? Is this saying there is similarity between an innocent victim of a genocide with someone who is creating a new genocide on another group of people?

In the American sensibilities, the Democrats are left wing.

I know we’ve shat on Americans too many times that Democrats are not leftists and Republicans are far-right, but there is a place and time for doing so and I learned to cut Americans some slack. Americans simply have different Overton window because of different history and culture (I have explained before as to why, but I cannot be bothered to write another wall of text about it). Other countries don’t even follow a left and right political dichotomy. Many places, especially in developing countries, vote on personalities than policies. But few of us crap on people from developing countries for not following policy-based discourse, or not following the European-originated sensibilities of “left or right” politics.

Correct.

From Call of Duty: Burger Town.

It’s up to the medical practitioners to decide.

Bought games from years ago I have to finish. Waste of money if I don’t complete them but I keep buying new ones.

I’m nearly finishing up The Witcher 2. Judging from the discussions, I’m afraid of starting Witcher 3 because I have other backlog of games I have to finish as soon as possible.

You said it better. Everyone around me “looks normal”, and what the post is saying is actually bizarre for me to be amazed at. The poster may have been surrounded by people open about their mental health issues, whereas in my area mental health is still a stigma to a large extent. Most people I interact with are ostensibly normal, but I know there some out there who take medications for mental health but they would not be saying and showing it to everyone.

The novel “The Handmaiden’s Tale” is literally inspired from real life based from the author’s observation of unfolding events in the 20th century, particularly the rise of Iranian theocracy and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and how they treat women. The author fears something could happen in the United States. And her fear is inching closer to happening in the United States.

Jacob Hersant

With a name like that…

The wunderwaffe was a last ditch propaganda attempt to boost morale of the Germans. Which kind of worked because many Germans still believed in the “final victory” with wunderwaffes along the way to save them, in spite of the Allies being at the gates of Berlin.