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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

    Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.

    So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.



  • My scalp condition is that I have too much hair. Too dense and thick, it gets greasy after not washing it 1 day, so I don’t even dare to replicate your experiment.

    I also used to have a cold weather dandruff problem, but that was solved entirely when I started always air drying after every shower. Thanks to a random tip years ago on reddit. My dandruff problem was apparently because of humidity.


  • My family (parents etc) have mostly learned their lesson now after all the news coverage, but before that I used to resort to hiding my good non sticks whenever they were staying over. If my parents complained about the shitty old pans that were available, then I pulled out my very sticky nonstick ceramic pan that they had roughed up despite my protests. I’m never throwing that shitty ceramic pan away, it’s way too effective as a rhetorical ploy now.

    Friends I still mostly don’t trust since I don’t know their kitchen habits well enough, but they’re less likely to try to help with cooking anyhow, only with dish washing and there it’s easy to hide the wrong sponges.

    If your chipped nonstick is teflon, then it’s garbage now imo. I would never cook in it again, too risky imo.

    And I now realize that I’ve become paranoid in my own kitchen.


  • And the most damning part of all imo: “the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves. Chemists at the plant used lead screens, tongs, and masks.”.

    The plant owners definitely knew that they were killing people, there should have been murder charges imo.





  • I live in Belgium. There are police officers who are racist, which is to be expected since a lot of Belgian non police officers are racist too. But they are not allowed to be openly racist on the job, because that can have consequences for them.

    Are our police fed up with the inner city street youth in Brussels, who mostly have an immigrant background? Definitely, but that doesn’t mean they are any more racist than the immigrants who are also fed up with the with thay inner city street youth. The root cause of those persisting problems is also a failing judiciary, not cop culture.

    But the thing is, the conditions, that make it so that “acab” is a thing with many police agencies, are not present in Belgium.

    Our police does not have qualified immunity, there are no no knock raids, there is no “we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong”, there is no systematic omerta to protect each other when crimes are committed. People aren’t even afraid of dying or getting their dog killed when they call the police.

    There are isolated scandals obviously, police people are human after all and there are all kinds of humans and all kinds of circumstances.

    There have been a few police scandals in recent years, but unlike with the USA police we keep reading about, those had consequences for the police officers involved. There is a very recent one of a group of police officers sharing racist memes in a private Whatsapp group and guess what, they got reported by colleagues and after an investigation, several police officers were fired.

    Is the Belgian police perfect? Far from it. But are all Belgian cops bastards? Certainly not. Our cops are not a gang that stands apart from society, they are very much part of it.


  • The policies of politicians and the humanism of police are not the same thing. A new party in power will also not change the culture of the workforce of an established service overnight, such a thing takes time. Time that those politicians usually don’t get in a functioning democracy, because in far less than a generation, another coalition of parties will be in the majority.


  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlHonestly
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    1 year ago

    It’s not a thing where I live. There’s going to be other countries where the police operate like a gang, but it’s just not the case in almost all OECD countries. In authoritarian states like Russia and Iran, sure, but in functional democracies, it’s just not the case. The USA is a big exception, it must be part of that american exceptionalism thing.


  • An interesting find that I didn’t know about, so to Google I went :)

    Apparently Lemmy communities can chose to disable downvotes. It’s apparently a simple setting, so Blahaj won’t be the only ones to have done so. Members of such a community are only able to upvote and will only see upvotes from other communities. And since that community server is responsible for syncing it’s own threads to other federated instances, it’s not going to collect the downvotes from the other Lemmy servers just to pass them on, so it only gathers + passes on upvotes. (If I understood it correctly)

    It also means that the few downvotes that we are seeing on Blahaj are not representative. Imo it might be better to disable downvoting for all, if the post was made on a server that doesn’t sync downvotes.



  • This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.

    The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.

    Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don’t get the point of this meme.