Came here to point to this.

Also, if outside noise is preventing one from keeping the windows open over night, get custom-fitted silicone earplugs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYoh6hVHufI

There are word filters for Lemmy?

Four minutes in and the analysis is just as what one would expect from a video with such a clickbaity title. Hardly worth anyone’s time in my opinion.

Matrix/Element

tbh I would prioritize ecology over Europeanness here and look for used storage disks (unless one has extraordinally high demands as to stability and integrity)

With the Murdoch empire, there is real hope that his three more liberal children will get the ability to overrule the fourth, conservative, heir. Long read

Not sure about Bertelsmann though.

Bertelsmann is the empire in question

As an aside, it’s always both a bit funny and bewildering how even the more reputable American media talk about Europe as if it were just one thing, so that, for instance, this article specifies it to Austria only several paragraphs into the text.

What a shame. Spain has been one of the scant reliable sources of positive news over the past few years.

Reminder: EuroNews is linked to Victor Orbán

Euronews is currently majority-owned by Alpac Capital, a company indirectly linked to the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán. (source)

Alpac Capital’s CEO Pedro Vargas David, is well established in the government of Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán and is the son of Mario David, one of Orbán’s advisers. In April 2016, Orban called Mario David a “true friend” and gave him the middle cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit. Due to Orbán’s repeated media violations, where he influences media regulators to punish any and all journalists who negatively reports on his or his government’s actions, Alpac Capital’s purchase of Euronews from Naguib Sawiris was put under increased scrutiny as an attempt by Orbán to influence wider European politics. (source)

Ever since the BSW has been founded as a split-off from Die Linke (The Left) in 2023, it’s confusing whenever articles just talk about the far-left or the left.

BSW wants relations with Russia as if their war in Ukraine never happened. Also in view of their other policies, it’s questionable whether this party is left at all; but in no case are they passionate idealists. They are no longer in the Bundestag.

Die Linke (which doubled its membership this year alone and surged to 8.8% in the general elections) is heavily critical of Russia. Their majority position is still against arms deliveries (although growing internal discussions may change this, late as it may be). Now already, they (in particular their co-leader Jan van Aken) are heavily in favor of well-coordinated sanctions, and are not just not supporting Nord Stream 2, but are one of the loudest voices demanding a swift crackdown on Russia’s maritime gas logistics as well.

Scharfe Kritik übte van Aken auch an den bisherigen Sanktionspaketen der EU, die aus seiner Sicht nicht funktionieren. „Man muss endlich mal rangehen an die Schattentankerflotte, die das illegale russische Öl durch die Ostsee fährt. Man muss rangehen an dieses Flüssiggas. Wir kaufen im Moment noch Gas aus Russland, und zwar in großen Mengen. Wir finanzieren den Krieg in der Ukraine.“

TIL:

Besides, some of our reported deficit in goods is probably fictitious. According to the official numbers Ireland is responsible for 1/3 of the EU’s trade surplus with America. That’s because according to these numbers Ireland sells 6 times as much to the US as it buys. But this is almost certainly a figment of accounting trickery designed to avoid taxes.

Here’s how it works: an Irish subsidiary of a multinational company that manufactures, say, pharmaceuticals sells the drugs at inflated prices to the US subsidiary that markets the drugs here. That reduces reported profits and hence taxes in America, while creating big but basically imaginary profits in Ireland, where corporate taxes are much lower.

Corporations hate this trick.

The last paragraph does address his motive:

Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above.

Interesting question. This is what I found.

What happened to the shaggy-haired freedom fighter, many asked [in 2015], and why has he taken a sharp right turn? But that is the wrong question, shaped by Western liberals’ erroneous expectations of post-communist central Europe. A better question is, why wouldn’t he?

(…)

He graduated [from law school] in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group, which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz. The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media. They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists. They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.

In the early 1990s, Orban decided to reinvent the party as a conservative and moderately nationalist movement. Many of Fidesz’s original members left in disgust. Others stayed loyal and were rewarded with ministerial posts in the first Fidesz government from 1998 to 2002. That laid the groundwork for Orban’s later slide toward centralizing political and economic power. It was based, say those who know him, on two pillars: ideology and electoral mathematics.

Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above. Nationalism, and increasingly, populism, provided the ideological underpinnings. The left of the country’s political spectrum was crowded with liberals and socialists of the post-communist variety. There was a large gap on the right, where, it is now clear, a majority of Hungarians naturally sympathize.

“The facility will open in 2028 in Saint Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana, a French overseas territory situated north of Brazil, Mr Darmanin told the JDD weekly.”

THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!

(Apologies for my capslock, but I really am stoked.)

Link to FreeTube.io download page

Thanks, https://cartes.app/ is great!

Interesting, and concerning, that this is an article by the dominant German news agency DPA. The clarification that it’s about members from the BSW, rather than Die Linke, first appears in the third paragraph of the text.