[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 1 points 6 hours ago

Plenty of valuable information here that puts both the tweet and the general movement of the ships at port into context

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 16 points 7 hours ago

All the other fleets have huge fuck off regions they patrol through while the 5th is exclusively stationed to patrol the arabian peninsula, Iran's coast, and the horn of Africa.

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 15 points 8 hours ago

@BobDole@hexbear.net puddle pirate shits more your territory so I'll rely on your for any nautical jargon

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 20 points 8 hours ago

At best, it's for the fleet to make guard duty easier with a mobile force on observation duty, at worst we're going to enter a new epoch.

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 45 points 8 hours ago

Whispers of rumors that the 5th fleet that's stationed in Bahrain has been deployed to the seas. Whether or not this is a combat deployment or a bout of nuclear chicken brinksmanship, or even fake news will only be known with time.

19
submitted 8 hours ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Fun and short little browser game letting you get a glimpse into how fucked and complicated the October Revolution was from the perspectives of the Mensheviks, the SRs, Kadets, or the Bolsheviks.

Game here

https://red-autumn.itch.io/petrograd-1917

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 8 points 11 hours ago

Kautsky to Lenin pipeline confirmed

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 20 points 13 hours ago

Can't be a winner until you learn why the losers lost loosingly.

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 14 points 13 hours ago

Bet you were a real Menshevik, bigly.

45
submitted 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

The game starts out with a quote from Kropotkin.

In general, people do not see events concretely, solidly. They think more in words than in clearly-imagined pictures, and they have absolutely no idea what a revolution is, – of those many millions of causes which have gone to give it its present form, – and they are therefore inclined to exaggerate the importance in the progress of the revolution of their personality and of that attitude which they, their friends and co-thinkers will take up in this enormous upheaval. And of course they are absolutely incapable of understanding how powerless is any individual, whatever his intelligence and experience, in this whirlpool of hundreds of thousands of forces which have been put into motion by the upheaval.

They do not understand that once such a great natural phenomenon has begun, such as an earthquake, or, rather, such as a typhoon, separate individuals are powerless to exercise any kind of influence on the course of events. A party perhaps can do something, – far less than is usually thought, – and on the surface of the oncoming waves, its influence may, perhaps, be very slightly noticeable. But separate small aggregations not forming a fairly large mass are undoubtedly powerless – their Powers are certainly nil.

  • Peter Kropotkin, The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Government, 1919

Game link below

https://red-autumn.itch.io/petrograd-1917

Also it seems like it runs fine on my phone browser so hey, time to do a revolution while on company time right?

17
submitted 14 hours ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
32

If there was a country that should be permanently demilitarized, besides America and England, it's the fucking krauts.

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 70 points 1 day ago

Looks like Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have both quit the DNC.

Unions seem to be separating from the Democrat machine more often than not these days

[-] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 67 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The cops caught Vance Luther Boelter lmao

Edit: I would say go figure the cops would actually put in some work because he was tarnishing their sterling reputation by dressing like a killer cop, but this fucking praetorian thumb was caught somewhere around his fucking house.

Edit 2: fuck all the lying press for presenting this fucking marble bust fucker like some kind of normal person with their photos and articles about him

36

G Gundam. I don't remember shit about it besides it being some kind of glorified tournament arc, the Japanese protagonists cockpit being wild looking to me, and one of the episodes with the American Gundam having some women sing "America the beautiful" while the u.s pilot was getting his ass beat I think.

144
submitted 1 week ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

https://x.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1930577884889977099

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine considers the decision of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland to establish 11 July as a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the so-called “genocide committed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic” to fly in the face of the spirit of good neighbourly relations between Ukraine and Poland.

In WW2, it is historically known that the OUN and UPA collaborated with Nazi Germany and engaged in genocidal campaigns of massacre against the Polish and their own people. While I'm not particularly fond of contemporary Poland, I fully support them in ensuring the truth of the crimes perpetrated against them by nazi Germany and their rabid Ukrainian fascist dogs isn't buried in the name of appeasing the modern Ukrainian fascist state.

Such unilateral steps do not contribute to achieving mutual understanding and reconciliation, which our countries have been working on for a long time, particularly in the format of the Joint Ukrainian-Polish Working Group on Historical Issues, which operates with the participation of the ministries of culture and national memory institutions from both countries.

Which constantly is having problems from what I hear through the grapevine, which isn't surprising concidering the representatives of the current Ukrainian government have been constantly engaging in fascist palingenetic ultranationalist historical revisionism in a vain attempt to turn their fascist national myth forgery into reality.

Ukraine consistently advocates for a scientific and unbiased study of the complex pages of our shared history. We are convinced that the path to true reconciliation lies through dialogue, mutual respect and joint work by historians, rather than through unilateral political assessments.

Never have I ever seen modern country actively use actual nazi race science (shut up I know you're about to snicker to yourself and say 'what about America'. I know!) To create a whole separate and distictive race of pure blue eyed blonde haired Ukrainians that's being contaminated by "filthy asiatics" of Russia. They literally use fucking skull calipers to differentiate between pure Ukrainian stock and barbaric spawn born from "miscegenation". The fucking Poles should call them out more openly.

We urge the Polish side to refrain from steps that could lead to increased tension in bilateral relations and undermine the achievements gained through constructive dialogue and cooperation between Ukraine and Poland.

Such as recognizing genocidal massacres done by the current Ukrainian regime's nazi heroes

Despite the bias and political context of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland's decision, we continue to conduct search and exhumation work in Ukraine and Poland, respectively. We have already achieved practical results in this area, which should be developed further in the future

Anti-fascism is completely unbiased and unpolitical. As far as I'm concerned it's simply a scientific process of sociological pathology.

Once again, we remind you that Poles should not look for enemies among Ukrainians, and Ukrainians should not look for enemies among Poles. We have a common enemy – Russia.

5 bucks for when Ukraine loses, there's gonna be acts of revanchist terrorism against the Polish People.

For the sake of the common strength, freedom and security of our two friendly countries, we must resolve problematic issues together, rather than exacerbating them.

Easy solution. Denounce your nazi ideology, purge the fascists from the government, then round up all the fascists and offer them to either die running into Russian machine gun fire or die running away from Ukrainian machine gun fire.

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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

Family members of the man charged with Sunday's attack in Boulder, Colorado, have been taken into custody, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday.

Noem made the announcement on X, calling the suspect, Mohamed Soliman, an "illegal alien" and "terrorist." He is facing multiple counts of attempted murder and a federal hate crimes charge for the attack that injured 12 people at a march supporting Israeli hostages.

"We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it," Noem said. "I am continuing to pray for the victims of this attack and their families. Justice will be served."

A DHS official said six people — Soliman's wife and children — were taken into ICE custody and will now be processed under expedited removal, which allows the government to deport migrants in the U.S. illegally without holding a court hearing.

Soliman is an Egyptian national who arrived in California in 2022 on a non-immigrant visa that expired in 2023, the Department of Homeland Security said. Officials said he filed for asylum in 2022.

The family had been living in Colorado Springs. FBI agents searched the home Monday morning.

At a news conference Monday, Mike Michalek, FBI special agent in charge of the Denver field office, said the family had been cooperative in the investigation so far. Officials said after Soliman was arrested, his wife took her husband's iPhone to the Colorado Springs Police Department.

The 45-year-old Soliman is accused of using Molotov cocktails and "makeshift flamethrower" in Sunday's attack, burning multiple victims, police and the FBI said.

Witnesses told investigators that Soliman yelled "Free Palestine" and "End Zionist" during the attack.

The injured victims include an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.

The group that came under attack, Run for Their Lives, has been gathering for a walk on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall every week for over a year to raise awareness about the dozens of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.

Soliman is expected to appear in federal court Friday afternoon.

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submitted 1 month ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — U.S. officials are not attending the main public event commemorating the end of the Vietnam war in Ho Chi Minh City this week, according to a guest list released by the organizers and seen by NPR.

I wonder why the u.s isn't joining thinking-about-it

Top of the list, announced at the final rehearsal for the April 30 military parade, are Vietnam's biggest friends — Laos, Cambodia, Cuba and China.

What a fun list of friends. Bet there's gonna be some fuckjng great food there

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops stormed the Independence Palace in central Saigon — now known as Ho Chi Minh City — ending the almost 20-year war that caused great losses to both North and South Vietnam, as well as the South's ally the United States.

What a fun twisting of history. Anyways get fucked America, it's time to party!

43

https://archive.is/RsKZq

It may be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Tony Gilroy's Star Wars series takes a key plot from a real robbery masterminded by Stalin in an Imperial Russian city. And Andor has as much to do with our world as it has with Stalin's.

Do you think Stalin would've liked Star Wars? I think he'd probably be a bit boomerish with liking 4-5-6 over 1-2-3.

It has all the makings of the perfect heist. The scheme takes place far from the imperial seat of power, on the wild fringes of an empire almost too vast to comprehend. Fuelled with revolutionary zeal, the plotters are a rag-tag outfit of men and women that includes thieves, murderers and turncoats. Their prize? A treasure chest of cash that can fund ever-more-ambitious missions against the hated ruling elite.

Shame the modern era makes that kind of wild west bullshit obsolete

If you watched the first season of the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor, you'll recognise this plot as one of the high points. Over three episodes, anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his band of accomplices hide out in mountain passes on the planet Aldhani, fine-tuning an audacious smash-and-grab from an Imperial garrison which is storing the wages of an entire sector.

The real-life theft that inspired it was also a long, long time ago, just not quite so far away.

I guess around a hundred years ago seems like a "long, long time ago" to some.

It took place in Yerevan Square in what was then the imperial Russian city of Tiflis, now the Georgian capital Tblisi, on 26 June 1907. A shipment of cash for the city's Russian state bank branch, amounting to some 300,000 roubles ($1m at the time), was stolen by a gang of robbers linked to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. Using bombs and guns, the gang left a scene of utter devastation in their wake; some 40 people were killed and dozens more injured. The news of the brazen daylight attack made headlines across the world.

For a much more better examination of the 1907 robbery, Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov by james white, Stalin: Passage to Revolution by Ronald suny, or even kotkin's book would be infinitely better that whatever pigshit mintyfork writes.

"A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire. I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation" – Simon Sebag Montefiore

Remember how I mentioned that sumy guy earlier? Here's what he says about shitbag Simon

I met Simon Sebag Montefiore in a café in Kensington, in London, once. He said, “So what are you interested in, and why are you writing this book?” This was before his book came out. And I said, “Oh, I’m interested in the labor movement, Marxism, social democracy, revolution.” And he said to me, “Oh, good. I’m interested in his women.” So I thought, “Well, okay, we have a nice division of labor.”

Montefiore wrote a very readable book. There’s lots of good stuff in it. He didn’t himself go into the archives, he doesn’t know Georgian, and I’m not sure how good his Russian is, even. But he did work there, and he got a lot of material, some of it brand new. That was good for me. But his book is a popular book. It’s a little bit, in my taste, sensationalist. Stalin is a bandit, a gangster, a womanizer, even a pedophile in the book. In all of these ways, it’s a different kind of book, and it doesn’t deal with Stalin’s journalistic writings, his theory of nationalities (which is key to his success), the intricacies and nuances of Russian social democracy.

My book is basically a scholarly book, but I tried to write it in an accessible way. Any intelligent person can read the book and understand what’s going on. But it’s based on the conventions of historical scholarship, which is looking for anomalies and dealing with contradictions. Everything is evidence-based.

Key fucking words: everything is evidence based. Even bourgeois historians have standards unlike shitbag simon

The heist was the brainchild of a charismatic cobbler's son-turned-revolutionary called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He was a gifted public speaker, an ex-seminary student, a romantic poet rumoured to have left a string of broken hearts in his rakish wake. He often went by the name "Soso" (which he had used when writing poems for local publications), though in years to come he would become far better-known – and feared – as Joseph Stalin.

He was more nerdy than the image of stalin shitbag simon sensationalized. Like he was literally booted from church school for bad grades because he was too busy reading banned books. That's nerd shit.

Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series' creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. "If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous," Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. "He looks like Diego!"

The only thing Stalin is notorious for in my heart was that he was too soft.

And hot.

Diego does kinda look like him.

Hotly.

Stalin took Russia from its war-ravaged imperial decline to a nuclear-armed superpower in just three decades, but also presided over a reign of authoritarian terror that starved, executed or imprisoned millions of its own citizens. Countless books had been written on his cruel years in power, but very little on his early years. Writer Simon Sebag Montefiore saw a gap, and began rifling through archives in post-Soviet countries to try and separate the truth from myth, and tell the little-known story of Stalin's early life.

And theyre all jagoff material heaping garbage piles of lies on his grave. And shitbags among the worst bullshitters.

A gangster and a killer

jagoff labels and all that, here's something that isn't examined closely about stalins life, how about looking into his stint as a general during the Revolution.

In 2007 – a century after the infamous heist in Tiflis – Young Stalin was published. It delved into the early life of the Soviet Union's dictatorial leader. "Should the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-Century's monsters, be quite so entertaining," asked a review in The Observer at the time.

Oh shitbag you fucker, I didn't know you waited to perfectly seize good PR for your shitrag by publishing in '07. What a fucking roach.

One person who read Young Stalin was Gilroy. The writer and producer, who had scripted the first four Bourne films and the Andor-precursor film, Rogue One, was planning a TV series that would explore Cassian Andor's journey from casual thief to rebellious figurehead. The true story of a revolutionary movement on the far fringes of a real empire gave Gilroy his source material. "Literally, I’m the classic old white guy who just can’t get enough history," Gilroy said in Rolling Stone. "The last 15 years, I’ve been reading all non-fiction." He added that Young Stalin was "an amazing book" and that its account of the Tiflis bank robbery was an "incredible movie sequence".

Okay if there's only one thing I will give positive credit to shitbag simon, it's being the wind from butterfly wings - being Stalin - that cascaded to us today having a positive representation of Stalin, albeit indirectly, in mass culture. Still, fuck you shitbag.

Did Sebag Montefiore ever think to himself, 'Here's the perfect setting for a Star Wars spin-off,' when he was researching his book? "No, I didn't ever think that when I was toiling in the archives in Moscow and Tbilisi," he tells the BBC. "But I did think that there was something pretty elemental about the life of Stalin, especially before 1917. It was a fascinating story, partly because no one knew about it."

Just a reminder he can't read Russian or Georgian.

The Tiflis heist was reported around the world and funded the revolutionaries' movement for years, says Sebag Montefiore. "Lenin and the whole Bolshevik Party lived off that money until the [1917] revolution."

That's more sensationalist bullshit because most of the money was marked and couldn't be cashed in. Hell, a lot of good communists were thrown in the clink because the Okhrana informed the internal security forces of the other European nations about the stolen cash and gave them the info to identify the marked rubles.

Sebag Montefiore says that the young Stalin and the troubled Andor bear striking similarities: "A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire," the writer says. "I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation. That's basically what Tony Gilroy has focused on in Andor."

More like Tony's focusing on what it takes to build a revolutionary movement and the people that make it. Shitbag simon drank the great man theory kool-aid hardcore.

Stalin was, of course, not the only figure fomenting turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and Andor fleshes out other characters with attributes from the young Georgian's contemporaries. Among Andor's co-conspirators in the Aldanhi heist is Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), an idealist writing a high-minded manifesto for the emerging resistance, similar to Bolshevik Leon Trotsky's polemics amid the opulent decline of Romanov rule.

That's an insult to Nemik. pika-pickaxe

And if I'm being real, an insult to Trotsky's own history.

Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen Rael, is an analogue for Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was able to form a powerful movement from unlikely bedfellows. A wealthy art collector, Luthen's precise manners in front of his gilded customers hide an uncompromising hatred of the empire and a restless desire to fund a growing resistance. In Cassian's talented, taciturn thief he sees a useful tool; Lenin saw the same in Stalin. "In 1911, people said to Lenin, 'Why are you using this guy? He's a gangster. He's had people killed. He was involved in all these bank robberies,'" says Sebag Montefiore. "And Lenin replies, 'He's exactly the type we need.' Stalin could edit a paper. He could write and could read. And he was also someone who could arrange a hit on somebody and arrange a bank robbery. That was what Lenin talked about: some people were tea drinkers, and other people were thugs, Stalin could do both, and that's why Stalin won in the end."

That's all fucking sensationalist hearsay, shitbag. There's libraries worth of information on the Bolsheviks, and in no such was has anything you've done contributed to it. I could spend several posts going over every single load of shit lie you've been recorded saying in this article but that's not the point of this post.

The birth of an empire

The research into historical rebellions – Gilroy has said he studied other revolutions while writing Andor, as well – has no doubt helped create the show's oddly realistic feel. Andor feels more down to earth than anything the Star Wars universe has shown us before, if you'll excuse the occasional spaceship roaring overhead, or an alien or two sitting in the local bar. There are flashes of mundane detail rarely scene in big-budget sci-fi. People complain that Andor's mother Maarva's (Fiona Shaw) house is always too cold. Security officer Syril Karn's (Kyle Soller) petulant intensity even extends to tailoring his uniform to make him look smarter than his contemporaries. The Imperial Security Bureau hoping to root out the emerging rebellion is a nest of competing ambitions that feels as real as anything in a historical drama – or in everyday office politik. There are fewer blaster-toting Stormtroopers than there are in the Star Wars films, and more sadistic, trenchcoated officers who would have been right at home in the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, or its Soviet replacement, the Cheka.

Other than saying fuck off you British fop for that last minute jab at the Soviets, andor is indeed high quality slop. The best that's come from the Star Wars series.

"In the past, Star Wars movies drop us in at a very big moment," says Walter Marsh, an Australian writer who praised Andor's grown-up worldview in The Guardian in 2022. "There's the big climactic battle, or Luke Skywalker's heroic journey, and they're these big themes of good versus evil. But as any historian will tell you, wars and empires and revolutions don't start and end overnight, and there's always this bigger backstory. There's this sort of long tail. It takes years for that kind of colonial rot, those systems of control, to set in."

I mean yeah, it's cinema. Not real life. Shit takes time.

Andor shows the corruption and brutal entitlement found at every layer of autocratic regimes: the guards drinking in a brothel while they're supposed to be on duty (and prepared to shake down anyone they don't like the look of); the prison industrial system that requires constant additions even if the new prisoners have done nothing wrong; the subtle sabotage of ethnic pilgrimages to sacred land that is earmarked for imperial development. And with authoritarianism on the rise around the globe, Andor has as much to say about today's world as it does about Stalin's.

One could even say it's a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

"When the show came out I think I was pleasantly surprised to see a story in that universe that was familiar, but which also approached this question of empire that's been so central to the whole franchise, but was never actually tackled in a really nuanced and human character-driven way," Marsh tells the BBC. "It's all well and good to have a big, evil Sith Lord achieve global, universal domination. But how does power assert itself on the street level, from one human to another?

Yep more andor glazing, love to see it. Probably the closest we'll get in America to seeing socialist realism in cinematic form before any revolutionary transformation.

"The Empire is this huge grinding, unthinking machine, but it's also a very human thing," Marsh continues. "Who are the people that find a place and thrive in those systems?" He remarks that in the original films the Imperials were little more than blank-and-you-miss-them pantomime villains: "British guys in suits getting choked by Darth Vader at some point, who are just fiddling with buttons in the background." Andor's strength is its "three-episode arcs that showed us the kind of death by a thousand cuts that it takes to achieve this sort of social, political and economic dominance", says Marsh. "The converse of that is it shows all the ways in which that kind of oppression inspires pushback and resistance in all kinds of different ways." From hero to villain?

Almost as if the empire takes inspiration from the United States of America. But who could really know what the authors intent was when he was creating the Empire. Certainly doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it was made during the Nixon Era when the Vietnam War was raging.

The new season, which begins on Tuesday 22 April, will develop the rebellion's story as it rushes towards the events seen in Rogue One: the scenes of brutal Imperial reactions to a demonstration shown in the trailer evoke the Tsarist crackdown on a St Petersburg march in 1905, which was a slow-burning contributor to the Bolshevik revolution.

Spread the word. Star Wars is marxist-leninist cinema.

"The scavenger who becomes a passionate revolutionary leader is kind of fascinating," says Sebag Montefiore of the troubled Cassian Andor. "That's a great trajectory, because that's exactly what Stalin did. And it'll be interesting to see how deep Gilroy uses that – how far he goes to create a character with both heroic and villainous features."

Fuck off shitbag

George Lucas's original film trilogy rooted the rebellion in the classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys dynamic of countless Saturday matinee cliffhangers, the resistance modelled after anti-Nazi opposition in occupied Europe.

The Rebel Alliance is modelled off of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the People's Army of Vietnam. Who are communists. Also the majority of the anti-fascist resistance in nazi-occupied europe were the communists. The original trilogy of 4-5-6 is communist in all but name

The rebels of Andor inhabit a much more compromised reality; like real-life revolutionary movements, they are much more complicated than the ones we usually see on screen. Luthen, Andor's Lenin proxy, considers it with chilling deliberation in one of the first season's standout scenes: "I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see."

Not chilling, determined. We all fight against the wretched darkness of ages long-past their expiration date for a red sunrise of a new world we may not see.

To quote a 1951 book, The life we prize, by the American novelist Elton Trueblood:

"A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit."

As Sebag Montefiore notes, the revolutionaries themselves knew deep down that if they took power, they themselves would have to use repression as a tool; they would become what they once despised. "Lenin himself said: 'A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.'"

Fuck you shitbag, he didn't say that. Also it's class war.

Fuck this writer sucks, he doesn't know how to finish an article in an actually meaningful manner.

24
submitted 4 months ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/anime@hexbear.net

sicko-jammin TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME, BABY!

82
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

Personally I hope this fucky wucky drives a stake through tik tok and actually gets a bunch of Yankees on actual Chinese apps and lead to a cultural transformation like we saw with the era of Japan's soft power impact on U.S culture. But paint it fucking RED BABY!

Trump says he will issue an executive order Monday to get TikTok back up

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he plans to issue an executive order that would give TikTok’s China-based parent company more time to find an approved buyer before the popular video-sharing platform is subject to a permanent U.S.ban.

Trump announced the decision in a post on his Truth Social account as millions of TikTok users in the U.S. awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform. Google and Apple removed the app from their digital stores to comply with a federal law that required them to do so if TikTok parent company ByteDance didn’t sell its U.S. operation to an approved buyer by Sunday.

He said his order would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.

“Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations,” Trump wrote.

The law gives the sitting president authority to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale is underway. Although investors made a few offers, ByteDance previously said it would not sell. In his post on Sunday, Trump said he “would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture,” but it was not immediately clear if he was referring to the government of an American company.

“By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up,” Trump wrote. “Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions.”

The federal law required ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations by Sunday due to national security concerns posed by the app’s Chinese roots. THe law passed with wide bipartisan support in April, and U.S. President Joe Biden quickly signed it. TikTok and ByteDance sued on First Amendment grounds, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the statute on Friday.

Millions of TikTok users in the U.S. were no longer able to watch or post videos on the platform as of Saturday night. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” a pop-up message informed users who opened the TikTok app and tried to scroll through videos. “Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” a pop-up message informed users who opened the TikTok app and tried to scroll through videos. “Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

The service interruption TikTok instituted hours early caught most users by surprise. Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users were expected to continue to have access to videos until the app stopped working due to a lack of updates.

The company’s app also was removed from prominent app stores, including the ones operated by Apple and Google. Apple told customers with its devices that it also took down other apps developed by TikTok’s China-based parent company, including one that some social media influencers had promoted as an alternative.

The Biden administration stressed in recent days that it did not intend to implement or enforce the nationwide ban before Trump takes office on Monday. Trump, who once favored a TikTok ban, said in an NBC News interview on Saturday that he was thinking about granting ByteDance a 90-day extension to find an approved buyer for the app’s U.S. operations.

“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned,” read the pop-up message the app’s users now see under the headline, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.”

The only option the message gives to U.S. users is to close the app or click another option leading them to the platform’s website. There, users are shown the same message and given the option to download their data, an action that TikTok previously said may take days to process.

Apple said in a statement on its website that three TikTok apps and eight other ByteDance-created apps were no longer available in the U.S., while visitors to the country might have limited access. The removed apps included video-editing program CapCut, art editing program Hypic and Lemon8, a video-sharing app that includes some of the same features as TikTok.

“Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said.

Apple said the apps would remain on the devices of people who already had them installed, but in-app purchases and new subscriptions no longer were possible and that operating updates to iPhones and iPads might affect the apps’ performance.

The federal law banning TikTok allows the sitting president to extend Sunday’s deadline by 90 days if a sale is in progress. But no clear buyers have emerged, and ByteDance previously said it would not sell TikTok.

Trump told NBC News on Saturday that if decides to grand such an extension, it would “probably” be announced Monday after he is sworn in as president. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration with a prime seating location.

Chew posted a video late Saturday thanking Trump for his commitment to work with the company to keep the app available in the U.S. and a “strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform. One who has used talk to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process,” Chew said.

On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Perplexity is not asking to purchase the ByteDance algorithm that feeds TikTok user’s videos based on their interests and has made the platform such a phenomenon.

Other investors have also been eyeing TikTok. “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary recently said a consortium of investors that he and billionaire Frank McCourt put together offered ByteDance $20 billion in cash. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also said last year that he was putting together an investor group to buy TikTok.

In Washington, lawmakers and administration officials have long raised concerns about the app, maintaining it is a national security threat due to its Chinese ownership and the large amount of information it gathers about American users.

While defending the law in court, the Biden administration argued it was concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of U.S. user data that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion.

Officials have also warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect. But to date, the U.S. has not publicly provided evidence of TikTok handing user data to Chinese authorities or tinkering with its algorithm to benefit Chinese interests.

The Supreme Court unanimously decided on Friday the risk to national security posed by TikTok’s ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

After TikTok’s service started going dark, some in China slammed the U.S. and accused it of suppressing the popular app. In a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief for the Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper Global Times, said “TikTok’s announcement to halt services in America marks the darkest moment in the development of internet.”

“A country that claims to have the most freedom of speech has carried out the most brutal suppression of an internet application,” said Hu, who is now a political commentator. TikTok does not operate in China, where ByteDance instead offers Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.

Under the law, mobile app stores are barred from offering TikTok and internet hosting services are prohibited from delivering the service to American users. Violators could incur fines of up to $5,000 for each user who continued to access TikTok, meaning penalties the companies could face if they continue offering TikTok could total to a large sum.

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submitted 7 months ago by Alaskaball@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/10/29/who-is-luce-the-anime-mascot-of-the-catholic-church-explained/

The Catholic Church has unveiled a new cartoon mascot known as “Luce,” and the raincoat-clad anime girl has already made a splash online.

Luce has been embraced and denounced by the extremely online masses, and, inevitably, inspired a ridiculous amount of fan art, and memes.

Who Is Luce, The Vatican’s New Mascot?

Luce was designed as a kid-friendly mascot for the Catholic Church’s upcoming 2025 Jubliee Year, which is all about hope, forgiveness and holy pilgrimages.

Catholic and kid-friendly do not belong in the same sentence.

Luce means “light” in Italian; the anime girl is designed to appeal to the youth of today, who have grown up watching One Piece and Demon Slayer. The character is rendered in the “chibi” art style, meaning short, cutesy characters with big heads and stubby limbs.

Luce was designed by Simone Legno, the Italian pop artist behind the tokidoki brand, who takes inspiration from street graffiti and Japanese art.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organizer for the jubilee, says the mascot was inspired by the Catholic Church's desire "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."

Luce also appears to be a pilgrim, which is why she wears a raincoat, muddy boots and walking staff, symbolizing her perseverance through a storm-ridden landscape.

Luce’s whole outfit is loaded with Catholic iconography and symbolism; she wears rosary beads around her neck, and her bright blue hair might be a reference to the Virgin Mary’s blue hair covering.

Luce also has scallop shells in her eyes, which are an iconic symbol of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, with the shell representing the way to the Cathedral.

Luce proved a pleasant surprise for anime-loving Catholics, instantly inspiring a deluge of fan art and positive commentary.

Many made comparisons to Rei, a blue-haired character from the legendary anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Others pointed out that Luce bears a striking resemblance to the “Morton Salt Girl,” the official mascot of Morton Salt.

It didn’t take long for artists to reimagine Luce in multiple different styles, and a variety of poses; the mascot even inspired Halloween costumes.

However, not everyone was impressed with the Church’s new anime girl; more traditional commentators saw the chibi mascot as an embarrassment, too modern and silly to represent their faith.

Some even compared the name of the anime character to the devil himself, Lucifer, but the supposed link was quickly debunked.

Okay this sounds like some shit my crank protestant theocratic fascist coworker would try to say smear the Catholics, like the fact that it's an anime isn't cringe enough as is.

Many commentators urged the traditionalists to lighten up, and made jokes about the cultural divide between Luce fans and haters.

Brightly colored cartoon characters are a fun, inoffensive way to appeal to the youth, and the Catholic Church could stand to shed its image as a dusty, archaic institution.

While Luce has been introduced online, the character is due to make her official debut at the Lucca Comics & Games convention in Lucca, Italy, in the first week of November.

Luce will also appear as the Vatican’s mascot at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, where she will be used to promote the theme of “Beauty Brings Hope.”

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Alaskaball

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